Dressmaker (4 page)

On the bottom stair there was a couple courting.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I want to get up there.’

They made themselves small, squeezing against the rail. The war had made everyone lax, openly immodest.
It wasn’t only the Yanks. There were all the jokes she heard at work about the girls in the Land Army getting in the hay
with the Italian prisoners of war, and ‘Up with the Lark’ and ‘To Bed with a Wren’.

Upstairs the place was in darkness. She tried putting the light on in the front bedroom, but there were bodies everywhere
– on the bed, on the floor – so she turned it off quick. But not before she had caught a glimpse of Valerie lying on her mother’s
bed, dazed in Chuck’s military arms.

‘Valerie,’ she said loudly, ‘where’s our Rita?’ And Valerie replied in a funny strangled voice: ‘She’s hiding, Auntie Marge.’

‘Rita!’ called Margo, thoroughly alarmed.

The back bedroom was empty. No breathing, no sounds. She put the light on. There was a small bed and a big wardrobe. She stood,
not knowing what to do; it was not in her nature to make a scene in someone else’s house. Nellie would look under the bed
and into the wardrobe, but this was Valerie’s room, private, full of her belongings and her secret jars of face cream. It
was a shock to find the room so plainly furnished – oil cloth on the floor and a cheap little square of carpet bought at Birkenhead
market. It was not as she expected. Where was the flam-boyancy, the style that showed in the clothes she wore? She opened
the wardrobe and looked inside. There was Rita among the dresses and the pin-striped suits, staring out, not touching the
young man with the long bony face.

After a moment of surprise Rita said: ‘This is Ira. He’s an American.’

‘How do you do?’ said Margo, and Rita stepped out of the wardrobe and he followed.

They walked ahead of her down the stairs, casually, not hurrying. In the kitchen she saw his face plainly: pale eyes, pale
mouth, colourless hair. They were like brother and sister. Not at all threatening, no bulk to him, thin as a whippet, with
big hands dangling and feet like an elephant. Rita was perfectly composed, sitting down at the table and sipping thoughtfully
at a glass of dandelion and burdock. He said nothing, leaning against the wall as if he was sleepy, looking at the girl.

‘Do you want to go now, Auntie? Have you had enough?’

‘Well, I think we better. I haven’t brought the key …’

‘And Auntie Nellie will be waiting up,’ said Rita, finishing the sentence for her, thanking Mrs Mander very much for a lovely
party, not looking at the young man, going out into the hall. Mrs Mander gave Marge a serviette full of ham for Nellie and
a pickled onion – to placate her, though she didn’t say so.

‘Tarrah, Valerie!’ called Rita up the stairs. ‘Thank you very much for having me.’

It was warm in the street, dark and sheltered. From two roads away the sound of a tram.

‘It’s not that late, then,’ said Margo wonderingly.

‘You look a fair sight,’ said Nellie, eyeing Margo’s washed-out face and the lipstick smeared at the corners of her mouth.

Mrs Lyons’ costume, inside out and lined with grey
taffeta, shimmered on the padded torso of the dressmaking dummy.

‘Did you enjoy yourself, love?’ asked Jack, of Rita.

‘Yes, thank you.’ And she was off upstairs to bed, not even bothering to wipe her face or clean her teeth.

‘What happened?’ asked Nellie. ‘Who was there?’

‘We played games,’ Margo told her.

‘Games?’

‘You know, party games. Hide and seek – and dancing—’

‘Hide and seek?’

‘Upstairs in the wardrobes.’ She fidgeted on her chair, aware that she had told a part but not the whole. ‘I’m tired, Nellie.
I’ll tell you in the morning.’

‘You’ll tell us now,’ retorted Nellie firmly. ‘It seems to have been a rum do. What about the sing-song?’

‘They had none of the neighbours in,’ said Margo.

‘Who played the piano?’

‘We didn’t have a sing-song. There were just Yanks from the camp and friends of Valerie’s.’

‘Did Mrs Evans do “Bless This House”?’

‘I told you, none of the neighbours were asked.’ She tried hard to keep the irritation out of her voice. ‘Mrs Mander saved
you some ham.’

She reached in her handbag and brought out the serviette parcel.

‘Very nice of her, I’m sure,’ said Nellie, unwrapping it. ‘Jack and I had rubber egg and boiled tomatoes.’

There was something troubling Margo, something she wanted to verbalise if she could only find the words. She
wanted to get it out because it put her in a good light, made her seem responsible and right-thinking. But how to phrase
it? She began: ‘I wonder if it’s normal for Rita to be so …’ and couldn’t go on.

Nellie said sharply: ‘To be what?’

Margo pondered. ‘So – quiet.’

It wasn’t right. Jack looked at her without expression.

‘I mean, she doesn’t let on much, on the surface, how she’s feeling.’

‘Get away!’ said Nellie, remembering the afternoon Jack had told Marge to give up Mr Aveyard. They all remembered it, even
Margo whose thoughts were confused. Jack had driven with Rita in the van to meet Marge coming out of work at Belmont Road
Hospital. She was a long time, and like all men kept waiting he was in quite a paddy when she finally got into the car. Blurting
it out with no finesse, telling her he and Nellie had decided she must give Mr Aveyard the push. Marge said she didn’t see
why she should, and he said women of her age got foolish notions; and that made her weep. And the child, leaning her elbows
on the front seats, stared at both their faces: Jack white because he was thwarted, and Marge with the tears dripping down
her cheeks. At the lights on Priory Road she had leapt out of her seat and run headlong down the street. Jack had followed
in the van, bellowing at her out of the window: ‘You daft baggage! Learn sense, woman!’ ‘I love him,’ screeched Marge, mad
with rebellion. ‘I won’t give him up, I won’t!’ And an old woman wrapped in a black knitted shawl, with a baby’s hand like
a brooch clawing at
the front of her bosom, stopped and turned to look. Jack jumped out on to the pavement and caught up with Marge, struggled
with her, tried to drag her back to the car. Twisting away from him, she ran like a girl down the side street, her hair coming
out from under her hat and her heels flying. Jack thought he heard a baby crying as he passed the old woman all in black,
but when he climbed into the car it was Rita. When they returned to Bingley Road, Nellie was angry with him. ‘You shouldn’t
have,’ she said, ‘not in front of the child, you shouldn’t have,’ taking the little girl in her arms and rocking her. ‘I want
my Auntie Margo,’ wailed the child, running to the door and not tall enough to turn the latch. There was nothing for it but
to sit in the best front room with the chair turned to the window, the lace curtains hitched up, so that she could see down
the street. Waiting. Twice Nellie tried to carry the girl upstairs to bed, but she woke and broke out sobbing afresh, so they
sat all night on the green plush chair. Now and then Nellie dozed and the little girl slipped on her lap and held her hand
up to cover her cheek from the row of pins stuck in the bodice of her aunt’s dress – then the light coming in the sky, like
war being declared or Mother dying, dramatic, till the bow-legged man came with his long pole and snuffed out the lamps in
the street.

‘I just wondered. I’m not easy in my mind,’ said Margo, watching Nellie picking at the ham crushed in the paper napkin, strands
of Silko adhering to her skirts, and Jack packing shreds of Kardomah tea into the bowl of his pipe.

‘How you can smoke that stuff beats me,’ said Nellie. She stood up, grasped the dressmaking dummy in her arms, as if she was
tossing the caber, and staggered the few steps into the hall. Parting the brown chenille curtains under the stairs with her
foot, she trundled the dummy safely into the darkness.

If I am seen, thought Rita, I shall deny it. I shall think of nothing but the house with the cherry trees in the garden and
I won’t hear what they say. She looked out of the window of the bus and resisted the temptation to hide under the seat. Her
companion, wearing a little mustard cap tilted over one eye, raised his long legs and rested them on the curved rail before
the window. She tried not to be agitated by his lack of consideration. Auntie Nellie said only louts behaved in public as
if they were in the privacy of their homes. She did notice he wore nice white socks.

All the way on the tram from Priory Road she didn’t think she would meet him. What if Auntie Nellie had an accident and they
phoned her at work to come home quick? She should have stayed in her seat till they reached the mouth of the Mersey Tunnel,
but she found herself standing on the platform as the tram swayed past the Empire Theatre with a picture of George Formby
pasted to the wall; and she jumped while the tram still moved, running on the pavement with her handbag clutched to her chest.
It surprised her. She didn’t look up, because that way it was more of a dream, walking through the crowds hurrying in the
opposite direction, with the stone lions crouching on St George’s plateau across the square
and Johnny Walker high on the hoardings above the Seamen’s Hotel. When she was little, Uncle Jack had held her hand, in the
dark, and said, ‘Look at his hat,’ and there he was, all lit up and moving, his hat coming off his head and his legs marching,
and the great bottle of whisky emptying as the coloured lights mathematically reduced. It’s me, she thought, and it’s not
me, scurrying along in her mackintosh, for it had rained without ceasing all summer.

‘It’s a helluva place,’ said Ira, looking at the scarred streets and the cobblestones worn smooth by the great cart-horses
that thundered down the hill to the coal yards behind Lime Street Station.

‘The place we’re going to,’ said Rita, ‘is quite nice really. Not like America, but it’s nice.’

She felt better once the bus was on the dock road going out of town, past the sugar refinery of Tate and Lyle, and the warehouses,
a smell of damp grain coming through the open window and the glimpses beyond the bomb sites of ships in the river.

‘Uncle Jack,’ she told him, ‘says the slaves built the docks. On the wharves they’ve got posts with rings in where they chained
them up.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it’s a helluva place.’

Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned the slaves, he being American and used to coloured soldiers. She hadn’t the knack of conversation;
all her life she had been used to being spoken to without the need to respond, of looking at faces without imagining she
was being observed. It came hard to her, the business of being alone with him.
She sat weighted in her seat, distressed by his silence, her neck aching with the effort of not turning to stare at him.
She would have feasted her eyes on him if others had been present, the pale saddle of freckles on the bridge of his nose,
the almost invisible line of his blond eyebrow, which she had registered on a previous occasion.

They were leaving the town altogether now, the miles of docks that carried on into Bootle and beyond, winding inland away
from the camouflaged depots and goods yards – not entirely countryside yet, but fields here and there separating the groups
of houses; allotments growing vegetables; washing hanging on a line strung between two leafy trees. They went over a little
hump-backed bridge and there were water lilies floating.

‘Oooh,’ she went, as the bus accelerated and dipped down sharply.

‘It’s not far now,’ she said, darting a glance at him, seeing his eyes closed as if he slept.

She hoped she had remembered the place rightly, had not mistaken its situation: a cornfield and ornamental gates guarding
a big estate, a small lodge house with a cherry tree growing against the wall. Uncle Jack had shown it to her when she was
a child, on the way to a farmer he knew, to slaughter pigs. And again at the beginning of the war, to a picnic at the side
of the cornfield. ‘When the Germans come,’ he said, ‘which they will, mark my words, they’ll smash the house down, quick as
a flash.’ ‘How?’ she asked, mouth open that such a thing could happen, looking in through the mullioned windows and seeing
a potted geranium and a round
stuffed hen with stippled breast and legs set wide apart. ‘Tanks,’ he had said darkly. ‘Armoured tanks, drive straight at
the gate and through, and Bob’s your uncle.’ And she saw it all, the bricks giving and the stairway collapsing, one wall with
a picture still hanging on a nail, and the hen with its stuffing coming out lying under the cherry tree.

When they came to Ince Blundell and the roundabout planted with pink and mauve flowers, she thought they were near. The bus
swung round the curve of the road, hugging the pavement, nudging the branches of a tree that brushed its leaves the length
of the windows.

‘Jesus,’ said Ira, waking in alarm, his eyes filled with a blur of green whipping across the glass.

‘You shouldn’t say that,’ she said, and could have bitten her tongue.

‘Are we there?’ he asked, yawning, and stretching his long arms above his head.

So eager was she not to miss the place that they left the bus a mile too soon, plodding along the main road lined with red-brick
bungalows, the sun coming out, not strongly but shining all the same.

‘Look,’ she said ‘at the gardens.’

And he looked, though she couldn’t tell what he made of the neat hedges, the shrub roses, the crazy-paving spotted with small
rock plants, white, blue and buttercup yellow. Isn’t it pretty, she thought; it’s so pretty. She remembered the back yard
under soot in Bingley Road and the one lump of lupins coming up each year by the wash-house wall.

The road cut clear through the woods. They were forced to walk single-file because the path was so narrow. On the films she
had seen women wandering down deserted country roads, dappled by sunshine, about to meet lovers or strangers, and they all
swayed with a particular motion of the hips, as if they were bare under their clothes. She herself moved stiffly, she felt,
like a nailed-up box. She had wanted to wear a thin summer dress under her mackintosh, but Auntie Nellie would have commented,
and she hadn’t known when she dressed that she had intended to meet the American. She wasn’t clear in her mind whether it
was fear on her part or a belief that he wouldn’t be there, at the bus terminal, as they had arranged. She wished it could
be hot and dazzling in the heat – walking hand in hand through the green glade and a rush of words because they were so close.
At the moment they were strangers, the words waiting to be said, but soon it would be different, she was quite sure of that.
She wished he could catch a fragrance from her hair or the folds of her sensible dress, that he would hold her hand as he
had done so fleetingly in the wardrobe, that he would look at her searchingly; she was so anxious for the love story to
begin. The gates were still there, set back from the road, the carved griffins on their stone posts beside the entrance, the
lodge through the iron bars, windows encircled by ivy and a tree growing close to the wall. But when she ran to look through
the gates into the house she couldn’t see into the room. In some way the lodge had retreated further into the trees.

‘There was a stuffed hen,’ she cried, ‘with a yellow beak.’

‘Hens,’ he said, ‘are cunning birds. Why, we had a hen at home that sat on a chair by the fire and never gave up. Not if you
poured water over it.’

‘Have you got pets at your house, then?’

‘No, we have a dog and a goat and a mare, but we don’t have no pets.’

She was mad for the way he said ‘dawg’, like he was a movie star, larger than life.

‘I had a rabbit called Timoshenko. I kept my nightie in it.’

‘You what?’

‘It was a bag with ears, for me nightie. Auntie Nellie made it me. When I got the measles she sent it to a children’s home
in case it was infected.’

He shook his head, either in sympathy or because he didn’t understand. He stood, scuffing his feet on the gravel, watching
the cars as they drove past. After a moment he said, ‘What we going to do now – now that we’re here?’

‘Just walk,’ she said. ‘We can’t get in there, it’s private.’

She tried to think where the cornfield grew, in which direction, beyond the woods or up the road. She didn’t want to go ahead
of him lonely any more, so she ran across the road and scrambled down into the ditch, climbing up on to the far bank with
her shoes soaked and her stockings splashed with mud.

‘It’s a helluva place to go,’ he said, looking at her across the ditch.

He stayed on the path, separated from her, as she tore a trail through the puddles of water and patches of bramble. She was
amazed at the amount and variety of plants that grew in the woods, quite apart from the trees – the quantity of thorn bush
and briar that assailed her on every side. It only made her the more determined; she wasn’t put out.

‘There’s a cornfield,’ she cried, keeping up with him as he sauntered along the pavement with his hands in his pockets. ‘My
dad took me when I was little for a picnic.’

He stopped quite still to look at her.

‘Your dad?’

It had slipped out, it wasn’t any part of them. She dragged her feet through the mud and wondered what Auntie Nellie would
say about the state of her stockings. I fell off a tram, she thought, and a dog got at me. In spite of the worry, she began
to laugh. It was daft to try and get away with it. She could see her aunt’s eyebrows slanting upwards like a Chinaman, bewildered:
‘You fell off a tram?’ Her eyebrows, grey like her hair, save at the tips which were tinged with brown, inscrutably raised
in disbelief. ‘I was pushed from behind, Auntie Nellie, and then this spaniel worried me.’ Like in the English lessons at
school, finding the most suitable word for the occurrence.

She gave little high-pitched gasps for breath, on her side of the ditch, treading the blackberries underfoot, her hair sliding
down out of the brassy Kirby grips, and he said: ‘You gone crazy or something?’

‘I’m thinking of me Auntie Nellie and what she’ll make of the state I’m in.’

‘You look fine to me.’

He had said it, he had noticed her. The journey on the bus, when he had so cruelly closed his eyes to shut her out, no longer
mattered. The trees ended: ahead, splayed out under the weak sunshine, three acres of corn, uncut because of the bad weather,
pale brown under a sky filled with frayed white clouds.

Marge had asked Nellie to call at the corner shop on Breck Road for her ciggies. She was going to have a bite of tea with
a girl from work and the shop would be closed by the time she came home. Nellie thought it a foolish thing to do, going off
like that to someone’s house after a hard day’s work, but she couldn’t interfere. There were times when Marge was adamant.
It was a nuisance, of course, having to keep her dinner warm in the oven. She hated sewing with the smell of food in the air.
It lingered, penetrated the fabric of the material; but what was one meal kept on the gas in a lifetime? She didn’t seek to
be restricting, but she’d always been a leader, even if it was in a purely domestic sense – arranging, decorating, budgeting
– and Marge was a follower. She’d do what anyone wanted, provided it was silly enough. Her intentions were good, but she lacked
tenacity. She was the big blaze that died down through lack of fuel. All that fuss about fire-watching in spite of her bronchitis,
down into town every night to her post, prowling about the roof of the Cunard Building with her bucket
of sand and her tin hat, keen as mustard at first, then sloping off home earlier and earlier, making excuses, absent without
leave. She couldn’t sustain it. When she came home one night with a bruise on her chin and her breath reeking of whisky, she
realised herself that that was the end of her little jaunt into battle. The truth was, Nellie thought, stabbing her hat-pin
into the back of her brown hat, it wasn’t only Marge that found it hard to preserve interest. She too was beginning to retreat
from the front line. She was forever peering out into the world, listening for the sound of the bugle, willing reinforcements
to arrive. She had confided her worries to Mr Barnes, the minister at St Emmanuel’s Church; but though he was a good enough
man, he was naturally limited by his own maleness from understanding her problems. She was concerned that when she woke each
morning to the alarm clock on the bedside table, her first thoughts were not thankfulness that she had been spared breath,
but worry over Mother’s furniture. Did the damp warp it in winter, the sun expand it in summer? Had it deteriorated in the
small hours of the night? There was dry rot, wet rot, woodworm. She lived in dread that she would be taken ill and begin to
die. Marge wouldn’t bother to wipe with vinegar the sideboard, or draw the blinds against the warmth of a summer afternoon
to ensure the carpet wouldn’t fade. She was indolent. She had sewn Rita into her vest when the child was small and the winter
particularly bitter. She could confide to Mr Barnes her weariness of spirit over the endless making-do with the rations, the
queueing at the shops; but to admit her
slavery to mahogany and rosewood was difficult, when he continually admonished her from the pulpit to consider the lilies
of the field. Had they been her very own lilies she would have spent a lifetime ensuring that they too retained their glory.
Brooding, she walked the length of the road, smiling briefly at one or two neighbours who nodded in her direction, clutching
her shopping bag to the breast of her black tailored coat. The thought of Mother’s things in a sale-room, or worse in the
junk shop on Breck Road, caused her pain in the region of her heart. She hoped she wasn’t about to suffer a decline. She would
wake at night with Marge lying beside her and remember quite vividly episodes of the past, unconnected: an outing as a child
to the birthplace of Emily Bronte; Father in his broadcloth suit; Mother faded, sepia-coloured against the sky, sitting in
the sparse grass on the moors, squinting into sunshine. Or she was at a desk at school with her mouth open watching a fly
caught in a spiral of light, beating its wings against the panes of glass. She lay moistening her dry lips with her tongue,
staring out into the dark little bedroom.